I finally got Walsingham to the table again, following my last round of changes. Once again, the mood at the table was subdued as it ended… and then suddenly passionate about the different ways the endgame might have played out. I’m now a little bit worried and maybe unsure what to make of this? But I suppose that for now, I’ll just keep making the improvements that are in front of me. Points is points, as they say, and better is better.

A rundown of the changes made, how they went, and what further changes might be on deck:

I tried a new auction mechanism, which was a little difficult to explain but completely satisfactory in execution. The new mechanism is this: You get two chances to bid. On your first bid, you can bid any unique amount. (So if Alice bids 4, and Bob bids 6, then Cindy can bid 0, 3, 5, 10… anything except for 4 or 6). On your second bid, you can either hold your previous bid or increase, but if you increase, you have to bid yourself up to first place. This keeps the auction fast and prevents people from weaseling into second, say. The last place bidder pays nothing (and gets a stipend). First place pays full price, and every other bidder pays half.

We played with rebalanced endgame scoring: 5 VP for stopping the Spy. The player who won this award (me) didn’t win the game, but it was very close, and to some degree I was punished for bidding mistakes.

The Spy felt… oppressed. It’s very difficult to subtly pick up Intrigue and not make it obvious to the other players. I don’t know how to deal with this. I could put more emphasis on the Spy’s chance for a VP victory (fine, but seems to take away from the drama of the game). I could give the Spy an easier time, for instance by making Accusations less punishing, but then the Spy has no incentive to play cautiously, again subtracting from the drama.

The players generally felt that the Rewards and Secret cards both needed “something extra”. I’m cautious about including new mechanics just for fun, but I think I agree. A little more texture is called for.

One of the improvements is that the money awards in the Rewards deck need to go. It makes no sense to bid money and then maybe get money back. I’ll probably adjust the last-bid stipend to compensate if more money needs to be injected back into the game.

A card that reduces the sting of Accusations. Of course, buying this card is itself suspicious! Alternatively: a card that provides a VP incentive for being falsely Accused. You have a lot of Intrigue and buy it. Are you a Loyal player hoping to score cheap VP, or a brazen Spy?

A card that is worth a lot of VP, but penalizes you if your Accusation is incorrect.

The “Big Reveal” card that requires you to reveal your Loyalty cards led to an interesting auction (the Spy bailed to avoid getting stuck with it) but having a Loyal player reveal reduced the drama and mystery for everyone else. The card needs to either be removed or reworked, perhaps to reveal only one of your cards.

A set of big-VP and big-Intrigue cards, but you can only score one of them. Some of these could even be Secret cards, which would add some more interest to that deck. Unless I have a better idea, I could theme this as “Political Marriage”.

The card that lets one player spy on all of another player’s Secrets is definitely too powerful for 4p; it just adds too much information. It might be OK for 5p or it might need to be toned down or reworked.

A card that blocks spying in some way. My brainstorm was: Block the next attempt to Peek at your Loyalty cards or Secrets. Both you and the blocked player gain $10.

A card that allows you to either Peek or gain some kind of resource.

Finally: Instead of money on cards, there could be some kind of intermediate currency or goal–having at least one, or having a certain amount, or having the most, could gain you a reward of some kind. That reward could be VP or Intrigue or one of the previously mentioned rewards–maybe the biggest Political Marriage?

At Jason’s request, here are the current rules to Walsingham. I’m a little nervous about writing these down because I don’t want to become too attached to them as they are; however, getting them written out will probably help me explain the game more smoothly the next time I explain it, so here you go. Everything here is 100% subject to change!

I finally made it back to my local design-and-playtest group night, BOGA DAP, for the first time in a while. Unfortunately, the only other person to make it was Philip Migas. Fortunately, he was willing to give the still-very-rough Badgerkastan a shot.

It was a very productive session because it confirmed that the core of the game, the bluffing and guessing, is fundamentally fun(good!). It also confirmed at this early point in the process that the game needs a total overhaul (inevitable, and obvious in retrospect) and gave me some good suggestions in the way of new directions to take the game (also good). Here is a summary of my notes:

The game needs a negative feedback mechanism. Currently, if your cards are in a good place and you score, they stay in a good place, and then your opponent has to both dislodge you and try to gain ground somewhere else. Apropos of this, the tug-of-war VP tracker doesn’t work well currently and doesn’t make sense at all in a game with a negative feedback mechanism. It needs to be a race, possibly with some kind of alternate sudden-death victory condition.

The fun part of the game is playing cards. You should get to play cards every turn and everything should spring out of that. Playing to each district should let you take the other actions right away. The districts can be balanced in that districts that are inherently valuable have less important actions.

This does mean that the Despot probably needs to be rebalanced to have a deck large enough to draw from.

There are probably too many districts right now. Five should be enough.

Tricking your opponent into using their power to fall into a trap, or scare them away with an empty bluff, is awesome. Drawing only bluffs when what you need is power sucks. Careful design is needed. One idea is to make most of the cards that don’t inherently provide power into traps of some kind.

The current “menu” of actions is too broad, adding confusion and providing new players with no idea of what to do. Associating actions with certain regions, which I like anyway, also helps mitigate this problem.

It would be cool to have cards whose effect is greater/lesser/different depending on where they are deployed.

Keeping track of where the game is on the your turn/my turn/whose turn to score is onerous and taxing, given the pace of the game. A tracker of some kind is needed.

The current mechanism of escalation, Foreign Influence, doesn’t work at all. One possible idea would be to use the time tracker to also escalate the effects of Foreign Influence over time.

Thanks very much to Phil for putting up with a still-raw game and providing many excellent ideas!

One of the rules I tried out in the playtest was: If there is no Spy, the player with the most Intrigue is eliminated, rather than earning a bonus. This rule arose thematically and on the surface I like it: if it turns out there is no Spy, the person who’s been snooping around all those seedy alleys ends up looking like a conspirator, rather than a hero.

However, upon reflection, this rule is lousy for several reasons, and I’ll be ditching it.

It’s an extra bit of complexity. Every rule that has to do with loyalty has to be taught and drilled in at the very beginning of the game, since you can’t ask clarifying questions midgame without giving everything away, so this rule is extra ripe for removal.

It scares people away from taking Intrigue, creating confusion. I had hoped that it would create a little mini-mind-game of players maybe wanting to deliberately avoid Intrigue. However…

Most importantly, it will never be relevant. To actually affect the outcome of the game, this rule would mean that one player would have to collect both the most VP (to otherwise win the game) and the most Intrigue (to lose instead). Given that VP and Intrigue do not usually appear together on cards, this is improbable to the point of impossibility, even in the face of soft or even inept opposition.

As a result, I’ll be ditching this rule entirely. If there is no Spy, there will be no bonus for having the most Intrigue (so gathering it was a waste) but there’s no overt penalty. I will also be removing the Secret cards that provided negative Intrigue and replace them with something else. I’m considering either a split VP/Intrigue card or a Secret card that provides a large Intrigue bonus (4 or so) if it is your only Intrigue-providing Secret.

Too many weeks after putting together the latest prototype, I finally got Walsingham playtested. I’ll confess that I had been procrastinating a little bit (pulling out Invasion instead, and so on) out of dread that it would fall as flat as last time. But I’m pleased that this playtest went well. I did a bit of tripping on the rules explanation, but I seem to have ripped out enough cruft that it flowed pretty well once we got rolling. The mood at the table seemed not super excited near the end, but, after it was over there was about 10 minutes of spontaneous discussion/arguing over who should have done what, who would have won, whether some elements weren’t worth enough points, etc.. That discussion was energetic, protracted, and not instigated by me (I was just taking notes) and it made me optimistic that at least the game was engaging and interesting. Here’s a rundown of my notes from both the game and follow discussion:

Both of the core mechanics–the auction and the secret agendas–were interesting, and they worked fairly well together.

The auction rule I used was the dollar auction from For Sale: you must bid higher than anyone else if you want to bid at all; you choose rewards in reverse order from drop order; non-winners pay only half of their bids, and lowest bidder pays nothing (and wins nothing but gets a $2 stipend instead). This worked well enough to be interesting but was very problematic when several players had enough for a bid but they were all edged out by one high bidder early in the turn order. Somehow, the bidding needs to allow players to enter a non-highest bid. I might end up choosing the system from Santiago that only goes once around the table, but you can make any non-duplicate bid.

The peeking mechanic (look at one of the target’s loyalty cards; the target doesn’t know which one was viewed) worked pretty well and there were an appropriate number of peeks in the deck to give interesting, but not complete, information.

The accusation mechanic (lowest showing Intrigue has to choose their accusation first) worked pretty well; I might need tokens for “successful accusation” to keep track of the points easier. The way it shook out in this game, one player went all-in and was pretty obviously the Spy (accused by everyone). I knew he was and vocally supported his accusations, and in the end, his Intrigue tied another player’s. Whew! I ruled that neither player had the most Intrigue, so neither the Spy’s auto-victory nor the VP bonus kicked in.

Apropos of this, I need to clarify all endgame ties, including who has to accuse first in case of tied Intrigue, which will probably happen a lot.

The cash allotment I went with was $15 at the beginning of the game, $10 after the first and second thirds of the game. The cash needs to be split up like this to prevent novices from blowing all their money early and being helpless the rest of the game. This kept the auctions interesting and nobody broke. It’s close enough, but I’ll need to recalibrate it if the number of rounds or the auction mechanism changes.

Speaking of the number of rounds, I actually only had the cards for a 4-player game. I had planned 12 rounds of 3 cards each, but went with 9 rounds of 4 cards each. (One player doesn’t get a card every round.) This duration actually seemed just right. I may be able to use the same number of cards for 4p, or maybe 9 rounds is the right length and I’ll just cut some of the cards out in 4p. (And add some more for 6p, which should work; I don’t think I’m going to try to shoehorn 3p in.)

The strongest disagreement in valuation was: how much VP should the player who prevents the Spy from winning get as a reward? It needs to be enough that this player has a chance to win and isn’t just “taking one for the team”; on the other hand, it needs to be small enough that you can’t win by ignoring VPs. I suspect the current value of 3 VP might not be enough. (The 2nd place player in this game had only 4 Intrigue, which was the same as the reckless Spy minus 4 accusations.) Brainstorm: This player gets 2/3 of their Intrigue as VP.

One of the minor mechanisms is that I have colored tiles with VPs and Intrigue on them that are part of the auctions; these colors tie into the Loyalty cards, and if your mix of tiles matches your mix of Loyalty cards, you get a VP bonus. The idea is to add some texture to the auctions and provide a little bit of information–is a player going for tiles that don’t seem to match their card you peeked at? Perhaps it’s a spy! The mechanism worked pretty well I think, but my explanation was very difficult, and because the cards are hidden, you can’t ask clarifying questions. I’m not sure what to do about this. One player suggested a cheat sheet/player aid. This seems reasonable, but I’ve still got my eye on the mechanic.

Minor notes: Find the colored meeples that I was planning to use for player/bid markers; indicate on the bidding track who pays what; assemble player aids.

Good news for the blog: I’m back from a week-long vacation to beautiful, relaxing western New York.
Bad news for the blog: My sabbatical from work is over, so my days of daily blogging about games are over. Twice a week is my tentative goal.

I got to playtest both Invasion and Badgerkastan tonight. Invasion went very well. The new anti-kingmaker-problem mechanism I wrote about before came up and worked well. The player who first exceeded the VP threshold went on to win, although the margin was small; the game was exciting throughout and the player in last kept struggling for his own score. The playtest also brought up a few wording changes that need to be made to Gadget cards, and I might need to examine the costs of a few of the Gadget cards, but so far they all seem to be usually desirable. So congratulations to Michelle, and thanks to both Ed and Michelle for trying it out.

Badgerkastan worked better, but not great. The Despot starts off very powerful. Part of the problem is probably that I let the Despot start with all cards in play. Probably the Despot needs to start with fewer cards in play and the Fundamentalist needs to have a prescribed starting hand. It’s also clear to me now that the game lacks an arc. The Foreign Influence mechanism, which I hoped would lead to an unbalanced-seesaw, isn’t anywhere near powerful enough to actually matter right now, and I don’t think that just multiplying its effect by 2 or 3 would make the game interesting. I need to find some way for the nature of the game to change midway through; perhaps this could be done by slowly or quickly granting a different selection of cards to one side or the other. I am also starting to have doubts about the quick-turn structure of the game. Each turn feels very small and if you can’t do much, you feel pretty stuck. I don’t know whether I need to make turns “bigger” by letting you do more, or placing each turn into a bigger context somehow, or something else. Thanks to Ed for giving it a shot.

A couple of days ago I looked at Civilization games and the entwined ideas of why they’re popular and the expectations that players have. Today I’ll look at why a 90-minute Civilization game might be a dream that never materializes.

Let’s start with the math. I’ll abandon the idea of a 5p game off the bat. With four players, this means that each player gets 22 minutes. This isn’t small, and ideally players can also use other players’ turns to think, examine opportunities, etc. However, we can’t leave out the heart of the genre: expanding and getting better opportunities as the game progresses. For this to feel meaningful, it means the beginning, middle, and end of the game all have to feel different. (Think of the settlement phase, buildup phase, and explosive final turns of, say, Twilight Imperium. Each player needs to spend around 7 minutes in each one of those phases, and suddenly now time is starting to look tight. We’ll need to skip exploration entirely, because that’s going to shove interesting but time-consuming decisions in the middle of every turn where it happens. If the player has several moving parts to consider–multiple bases, multiple armies–a two-minute turn might be OK but still feel rushed. So we need to get an interesting amount of action and decisions into a total of nine two-minute turns.

But wait, there’s more. We also need to provide a way for the players to interact. With only nine turns, we can’t have much tactical or positional back-and-forth. (Eclipse manages, but that’s because it breaks up its nine-turns into mini-player-turns. This makes a fantastic game but means it takes about twice as long as our hypothetical Grail.) This means that any aggression is going to have to be pretty abstract. If combat has a lot of randomness, that’s exciting to play, but it means that after every fight every player is going to have to recalculate all their options. If combat is more deterministic (comparing military values or whatever), that’s faster to resolve, but invites a lot of thinking or analysis paralysis before the fight breaks out. Adding the possibility of alliances or trade between players is a desirable feature, and a way to add balance and drama by letting the players resolve a runaway leader themselves–but the more freeform the negotiations can be, the longer the game will take.

After this amount of thinking about it, the idea of a 90-minute Civ game seems extraordinarily ambitious but not, as I had suspected at the outset, outright crazy. It requires some well-considered and painful sacrifices of a couple of genre tropes, which will certainly turn some people off; it requires very elegant mechanisms for expansion, exploration, and technology, probably even creating some innovative new ones or combining existing ones in unexpected ways.

I got in a playtest of the previously-untitled bluffing game that I prototyped a few days ago last night. I’m pleased to find that the concept shows promise, although it clearly has a long way to go; enough promise that it’s worth talking about here.

First, I’m going to go with Badgerkastan for a working title. It lends itself well to the dark-humor tone I’ve got in mind now, and if I need to lighten the tone: well, anthropomorphic badgers are just as good as the go-to fantasy or SF tropes.

An overview of the game: The players are vying for control of seven ministries of Badgerkastan (the Ministry of Petroleum, the Secret Police, the Underworld, etc.) Each player plays cards face-down to their own side of the ministry. The Despot wins ministries by default when they are scored–more about that in a second–but the cards and actions they can take are different:

The Fundamentalist has a hand of cards and draws one for free from a 30-card deck every turn. This deck contains a bunch of Desperate Civilians (which are bluffs, and do nothing) but also Fanatic Infiltrators (which win the ministry), Sympathetic Innocents (which grant Foreign Influence if they are killed by the Despot), and Bombers (which prevent the ministry from scoring altogether, and grant the Fundamentalist bonus points if the important Despot characters were present). With an action, the Fundamentalist can draw extra cards or place three cards into any ministry. By spending cash (a secondary resource that is gained by spending an action or winning certain ministries), the Fundamentalist can draw and place in the same action, recall and redeploy many existing cards, or reveal Despot cards.

The Despot always has access to all their cards. The Despot controls a Popular Reformer (that cancels one Fanatic Infiltrator), a President’s Cousin (that cancels any number of them), and an Oil Executive, which grants Foreign Influence if it scores. With an action, the Despot can move two cards, reveal two Fundamentalist cards, or kill one Fundamentalist card. By spending cash, the Despot can kill or reveal all the Fundamentalist cards in a location.

A separate Scoring deck shows the ministries that will soon be scored; five scoring cards are laid out in a queue. The flow of the game is this: after every three half-turns, the player who’s about to play chooses a ministry to score. Choosing the first scoring card is free; you can also choose later from the queue (discarding everything that was skipped) for $1 per card. When a ministry is scored, all the cards in it are revealed, and the winner advances the score marker the appropriate amount towards their side. Scoring is a tug-of-war, but every Foreign Influence increases all your future score gains by 1, which should (hopefully) make the game end eventually.

After two games, we found that the Despot side is much too strong; the ability to win ties, plus the relative scarcity of Fanatic Infiltrators, means it’s too easy to secure safe ministries to score. Here are the changes I have ready for the next iteration. Hopefully these will even the scales, add another layer of guessing, and allow some mechanisms that didn’t quite work before to shine:

Fundamentalist gets 5-6 new Angry Mob cards. Two Angry Mobs will allow the Fundamentalist to win a ministry if the Despot doesn’t have a defender present.

Fundamentalist gets 2-3 new Foreign Martyr cards that grant cash if the Despot kills them. (We felt that the Despot could use the ability to kill Fundamentalist cards with relative impunity, even with Sympathetic Innocents available.)

Fundamentalist gets 1-2 new cards, title unknown, that can win a ministry on their own if no Despot cards are present (even the bluffs).

Fundamentalist gets an additional free option: draw one card, play one card.

Fundamentalist will probably lose one Sympathetic Innocent.

Despot gains a new Riot Police card that cancels Angry Mobs. It also returns cards to hand when the ministry is scored, instead of leaving them revealed.

Despot gains a new War Profiteer card that grants cash if it is present when the Fundamentalistscores.

Despot’s paid action that examines a Fundamentalist card and can kill it can now optionally return it to hand as well.

Despot gets a new paid action to kill two cards in different locations.

Both Despot and Fundamentalist have action costs reduced to make prohibitively-expensive actions worth considering.

All ministries now score the same for both sides. I had thought some asymmetry here might be interesting–it turns out that in a two-player game, it’s not, and doubly so since the scoring is a tug-of-war.

A few days ago I wrote about why I think the goal of Walsingham is a “Holy Grail” design. It’s the Holy Grail I am most interested in, but not the most famous. The most famous Holy Grail design, I think, is “Civ-Lite”, or a Civilization game that plays in 90 minutes or less. To get an idea of why that goal seems so out of reach, let’s look at the existing Civilization games and what players expect from them.

The first Civilization game was, well, Francis Tresham’s Civilization, published back in 1980 by Avalon Hill. The game is well-regarded but long out-of-print; I have never actually played. Each player controlled a Mediterranean civilization (Egypt, Assyria, Crete, etc). struggling for supremacy from the late Stone Age through the early Iron Age. The Civilization board game inspired the classic video game by the same name; Civilization was excellent, widely popular, and became in many eyes, including mine, the prototype of what a “4X” game should be. The 4X acronym stands for:

eXplore: players start off without much knowledge of the world and must explore to find resources and contact other players

eXpand: players grow their empires and claim territory by colonizing the areas around them

eXploit: players use the resources to research technology, create civic improvements, and muster military units

eXterminate: players are able to attack one another, gaining control of territory and possibly winning through eventual world conquest

Although it’s not spelled out in the acronym, technological progress has always been a key part of the Civilization series and the games it’s inspired. Technology provides more powerful military units, the ability to create bigger and more productive cities, and other capabilities as well, such as espionage or incresed mobility. One of the interesting parts of a Civilization-type game is prioritizing what technologies is most important to develop, and prioritizing technology which will be useful in the future against a military buildup that might be needed immediately.

(Whether on the computer or tabletop, most 4X games have either been about historical Earth civilizations, or interstellar civilizations, often starting off at the dawn of interstellar travel. On the computer, the Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations series use the latter theme. A notable outlier is Alpha Centauri, a science-fiction game that takes place on humanity’s first colony, a single planet orbiting the titular star.)

Building a 4X board game is not easy, but it’s been done successfully several times: Twilight Imperium, Eclipse, Civilzation: the Board Game, and Through the Ages are all popular.

eXplore: It’s very hard to simulate fog-of-war, where some players have geographic information but not others, on a tabletop board. Often exploration reduces to granting the first player to send scouts into a new area a random event which can be good or bad (an ancient technology, a resource cache, angry natives, etc.)

eXpand and eXploit: This is board games’ wheelhouse; from Settlers of Catan to Puerto Rico to Hansa Teutonica and far beyond, many games have been designed and developed to challenge players to find the best ways to turn the resources they have into the resources they need.

eXterminate: This is the toughest challenge for a designer. Players expect direct, aggressive conflict; and this conflict will indeed drive the tension and drama that makes 4X games memorable. Naturally, this aggression usually takes the form of conquest. This opens up many design issues, though:

The conflict should not take too long to resolve–or the players who aren’t directly involved will get bored on the sidelines

There should be a way for wars to be limited, rather than total. On the computer, this is often modeled through war-weariness, having to spend resources to quell rebellions in captured territory, etc.. These details would typically be elided from a tabletop game, but if they’re simply removed, there’s little reason to simply take a few resources from a beaten foe rather than conquering everything. (Civilization: the Board Game handles this by saying: if you capture the capital of any rival, you win immediately! This provides a strong incentive to ally against an aggressive rival–or for a third player to threaten to pick off the loser and claim victory if the fight proves indecisive.)

There should be a way for players to ally with each other and against others to mediate a balance of power.

Technology: Like expansion and exploitation, the idea of gradually increasing capabilities is familiar territory for board games; unlike expansion and exploitation, the 4X genre demands a level of scope and sophistication that’s beyond, say, Hansa Teutonica‘s advancements or Agricola‘s occupations. Technology needs to be integrated into the resource system; it needs to meaningfully affect both your military power and further resource-handling capabilities; and there needs to be a way of tracking it so you can determine what every player can do as the game progresses.

This article is already long enough, so in a later article I’ll talk about the additional complexities of trying to distill all of this excitement into a 90-minute game, and discuss why that Grail might be entirely legendary.

A few days ago, I wrote about some of my favorite software tools for prototyping. Today, I’ll list some of my favorite physical tools.

Rotary Paper Trimmer: I use this to cut out cards printed with nanDECK. It’s much faster than using scissors and gives more satisfying, straighter cuts. I have a large one that makes it easy to line up a large piece of paper on the grid lines, which is also helpful. (I print on ordinary printer paper rather than cardstock, then put the slips of paper into a sleeve backed with an old CCG card, like making proxies.) Mine is a Fiskars that I got at Costco a long time ago.

As a side note, Dragon Shield and KMC sleeves are the best I have found, but they’re on the expensive side. Most of my prototype sleeves are ugly holographic Ultra Pros that I got in the bargain bin at an Origins booth.

Plastic Cubes: Whether these are player markers, resources, trackers, or something else, almost every game needs cubes for something for another. The best deal I found is at educational supply store EAI.

Glue Stick: Liquid glue is messy and warps paper. Tape doesn’t roll on well and sticks up. Glue sticks are perfect. I mostly use glue to mount printed gameboards to posterboard to give them some heft (laminate at OfficeMax for extra durability), and to mount small paper squares to craft-store chipboard squares to make counters.

Cutting Mat/Utility Knife/Metal Ruler: This trio of items is how I cut posterboard to the right size to mount printed gameboards on. The cutting mat and ruler are from a discount craft store; the utility knife, from a hardware store. I used to use an X-Acto knife; the utility knife is a much better tool for cutting cardboard.

B&W Laser Printer: I have a Brother laser printer which I love. It’s reliable, sharp, and above all, cheap to operate. I do color printing at OfficeMax/Staples/Kinko’s; it’s cheap enough that trying to maintain my own color printer doesn’t make sense..

Sharpie Permanent Markers in a variety pack: For adding small amounts of color to home-printed B&W documents, and making changes post-printing or on-the-fly. Also for playing 1000 Blank White Cards.

Swingline Laminator:This is the newest item on the list–a Christmas gift last year–but already I love it. I would not have even thought to get it for myself (lamination is hard, right?) but the device is inexpensive ($20-$25), easy to use, and the sleeves are inexpensive as well. Laminating is a surprising way to give printed-out materials a lot of durability, heft, and even gravitas.